Truth

Focus on the last days of news anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes at CBS News, after broadcasting a controversial report about how President Bush, running for reelection at the time, had relied on preferential treatment to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War.

Kruth is an American biographical political drama film written and directed by James Vanderbilt, based on the 2005 memoir Truth and Duty: The Press, The President And The Priviliege Of Power by Mary Mapes. The film stars Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mapes. It is the directorial debut of Vanderbilt.

The film was selected to be screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. It is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 16, 2015.

About the Story

Mary Mapes, producer of the primetime news program 60 Minutes Wednesday, her crew, and CBS national news anchor Dan Rather face accuracy questions following the airing, in the months before the US 2004 presidential election, of a report that President George W. Bush, then seeking re-election, had in the early 1970s received preferential treatment from officials of the Texas Air National Guard. The allegation included concealing Bush’s failure to meet even minimal training and performance requirements, and his absence from the Air Guard for most of 1972 following a transfer to the Alabama Air National Guard.

The core documents on which these allegations were based were immediately called into question by a variety of sources. The controversy about the documents being forgeries first appeared on a blog, which was then investigated and amplified by various talk radio hosts, bloggers and numerous mainstream media sources, including The Washington Post and CBS itself. They found that certain characteristics of the memos, such as its font and letter spacing, indicated the memos were created on a computer using Microsoft Word, and therefore could not have been typed on a typewriter in the early 1970s. Subsequently, the person who produced the documents admitted that he had lied about where he had obtained them.